It’s been a couple of weeks since the US presidential election, which seems like the perfect time to watch this film. During my viewing, I held a question at the back of my mind: could America actually erupt into violence? It’s depicted so realistically in the film that sadly, I feel like the answer is yes. But also, the film avoids commenting on the specific political realities that would lead to such a scenario, which I think is to its credit. If its messaging were too true to life, I would be so filled with dread while watching it that I would miss the more personal story at its core.
The protagonists of the film are photographers who pride themselves on documenting the truth in a neutral way. As someone who dabbles in photography, I bought into the film’s insistence on the power of images. Visually, the film gets a lot of mileage out of juxtaposing iconic American imagery—e.g. a Christmas village, a small-town Main Street, the many monuments of Washington D.C.—with soldiers in battle. The action scenes are intense and appropriately scary. Ultimately, the movie shows the inevitability of war journalists becoming hardened and traumatized by the death that surrounds them, and makes you wonder if it’s worth it.
Spoiler warning: Out of necessity, I have to reveal the plot in order to discuss my opinions of this film.
On the surface, this movie is fun to watch. It’s suspenseful and propulsive, and features a great performance by the lead actor, Willa Fitzgerald. However, I ended up disliking it after giving it a few minutes’ thought.
For this Halloween season, I caught up with a few horror movies from the past year. Although I enjoy horror films, I admit I’m too much of a scaredy-cat to go see them in a dark theatre with the big screen and loud sound. As a compromise, I wait for them to come out on home video so I can watch them in a less intense environment.
For this year’s first TIFF Secret Movie Club screening, we saw this Australian stop-motion animated film, about the tough life of a young woman who loses her family to various tragedies. Her emotional refuge is collecting—and hoarding—snails and snail-related paraphernalia; anything that evokes the spiral shape of a snail shell is irresistible to her. Like Uzumaki, this manifests as dense repeated visual patterns that I’m sure would reward repeat viewings. The jerky motion of claymation is inherently “cute,” but the colour palette of mostly browns and greys, as well the perpetually droopy-eyed expression of the protagonist Grace, serve to offset the quirkiness with a dour mood.
One of last year’s Secret Movie Club selections, The Iron Claw, depicted so much tragedy and loss that were it not based on a true story, I would think that the writers were overdoing it, sacrificing believability in order to tug at viewers’ heartstrings. Memoir of a Snail, because of its biopic-like structure, and of course, its title, had me believing that it also was a true story, despite its fantastical and whimsical visuals. I kept thinking, Wow, how did this person endure so much pain and trauma?, as if it were a real person.
It’s only in hindsight that I realize that it must be mostly fiction. Unfortunately, this leaves me feeling deceived. In my opinion, by putting its main character through the ringer, only to give her a twist happy ending, the film strays into emotionally manipulative territory. In the Q&A session afterwards, writer/director Adam Elliot says that he wants to achieve two things with his films: make the audience laugh, and make the audience cry. I think he tries a little too hard to reach this goal.
I watched this movie before TIFF, and then I got busy with my “coverage” of the festival, followed by a vacation. But the film left enough of an impression on me that I wanted to circle back and write down a few thoughts.
I opted to watch this rather lengthy movie one hour at a time, over three consecutive days. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that it’s rare for me to be able to spend 3 uninterrupted hours doing any one thing.
As it happens, Drive My Car works really well as a kind of miniseries with roughly one-hour episodes. The film’s pace is definitely slow, with plenty of quiet passages where characters travel in—you guessed it, a car—but it didn’t test my patience, partly because I was coming to it fresh every day. There’s also a clear three act structure to the story, which lines up nicely at the hour marks.
The protagonist, Kafuku, is a stage actor and director, who is grieving the loss of his wife. His feelings are complicated, as he is aware that she was having a secret affair with another man. In an ironic turn, Kafuku heals partly by meeting and “befriending” the man who cuckolded him (although “be-frenemy-ing” might be a better term for it). In their tense conversations, the two men never explicitly mention the affair, but they both know that they both know.
The Assessment, Emilia Pérez, Seeds, The Paradise of Thorns
Another year, another TIFF. Before I dive into the movies that I saw, I have to comment on the increasingly frustrating ticket purchasing process. New this year, you select seats for every screening while buying the ticket. On the face of it, this has definite advantages: it’s less stressful when entering the theatre because there’s no need to rush to find a good spot, and it leaves you time to freely take that all-important pre-show bathroom break.
On the other hand, what might not be obvious is that the seat selection is not equally available to everyone. TIFF offers paid memberships that include discounts on year-round screenings, access to a lounge in the Lightbox venue, and importantly, early access to ticket sales for the festival. Previously, it meant that members had a better chance at getting tickets for popular films, but now, with the seat selection, it means that they get to scoop up all of the best seats, too. When I purchased tickets as a non-member this year, I found that many screenings had only the worst seats left, like the first row right in front of the screen, and I decided not go to that show. In previous years, I would have just bought the ticket, and arrived early enough to find a good seat.
The resulting feeling is that TIFF is becoming more and more exclusive, where the people who pay the most get the best experience. The festival has always played on its reputation for being the “people’s festival,” in contrast to more insider events like Cannes and Venice, but in my mind, it’s slowly losing its claim to that reputation.
This is a moody film, about a pair of friends who bond over a fantasy-action TV show as teenagers. As they enter adulthood, it appears that one of them has disappeared into the world of the show, leaving the other one “stranded” in a miserable suburban life. When I say “moody,” I refer to the creative lighting choices and surreal editing (👍), but also to the acting style, which is monotonous and mumbly throughout (👎).
I understand that the film is an allegory for the trans experience, and I respect it for that. The friend who lives out their life in the “real world” is filled with pain and regret because they didn’t get to exist as their true self in the world of the beloved TV show. However, if I didn’t know ahead of time what the metaphor stood for, I don’t think I would have made the connection on my own, and the film would have really dragged for me.
What I could relate to was being obsessed with certain shows in my youth. I’m reminded of the time that a friend called me for homework tips during Seinfeld’s Thursday night timeslot, and I got mad and yelled at him to get off the phone. Or the time when YTV aired a mid-season cliffhanger of Dragon Ball Z (right before Goku’s first Super Saiyan transformation), and I got so impatient for the next block of episodes that I used the new-fangled technology of the Internet to write a pleading letter to the TV station.
My point is, I know what it’s like to be passionate about a piece of entertainment. But in the film, the performances are so (intentionally) dreary that the emotion doesn’t come through. I was left feeling a bit empty by the film, even if I admired what it was trying to say.
I was reminded of this movie when news broke about Scarlett Johansson’s dispute with OpenAI for using her vocal likeness without permission.
I recall being underwhelmed by my first viewing when it first came out. Back then, I thought it was a simply a riff on the rom-com formula, which swaps one of the couple with an artificial intelligence1. In hindsight, I understand my lukewarm reaction as coming from my lack of relationship experience. At the time, any romance that I saw on screen, even between human characters, felt artificial to me because they were only characters, and I couldn’t see myself in them. The fact that one of the characters was a computer program didn’t make it any more artificial.
But now that I’m happily married, movies like Her work much better for me, because of course there’s a difference between connecting with a human and conversing with your phone. Of course the protagonist would be attracted to a personality that molded itself to his needs, after losing a marriage to someone he loved but didn’t love him back.
I’ve been selectively revisiting the X-Men series, which, as a whole, are known to be a mixed bag. At their best1, they’re great action spectacles that effectively explore the opposing philosophies of Professor X and Magneto. At their worst… well, I didn’t rewatch the bad ones, so I won’t comment.
These two entries, both directed by James Mangold, stand apart from the rest in the way that they zoom into the psychology of a single character. The Wolverine is the more conventionally comic-booky of the two, featuring ninjas and a cool bullet train fight scene. Logan doesn’t feel like a superhero movie at all, and lands more like a crime drama, with brutal violence that makes you feel every kill.
Both follow a similar emotional arc for the character: he’s a broken man, haunted by the past, until he finds someone to care for and protect. It’s especially effective in Logan, due to the compelling performance by Dafne Keen as Wolverine’s clone-daughter.
I have to say though, Wolverine’s lack of emotional range (99.5% brooding and angry, 0.5% vulnerable) is more noticeably one-note when he’s flying solo and not part of a team.
